Adata continues its NVMe offensive with the XPG SX7000

A while back, we reported on Adata's XPG SX8000, the company's first entry into the burgeoning NVMe storage market. Adata is now releasing its second line of high-performance gumsticks, the similarly-named XPG SX7000 series. The new drives' specifications come in a bit lower than the SX8000 models, but the promised performance is still far in excess of what even the fastest SATA SSDs can dish out. The product pages and data sheet talk up 128 GB, 256 GB, and 512 GB models, but the image gallery contains a photo of a unit marked with a 1 TB capacity, so it's likely this version is on the way, too.

Like similar offerings, the XPG SX7000 comes in an M.2 2280 package and operates over a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. The 3D NAND flash chips get their marching orders from a Silicon Motion controller, though Adata doesn't name the maker of the flash modules or the exact controller model. The drives do come with a DRAM cache and a pseudo-SLC caching scheme.

Adata says the SX7000 delivers up to 1800 MB/s of sequential read performance and up to 850 MB/s in writes. As usual, these claims apply to the largest-capacity 512 GB model. The 128 GB drive's peak sequential throughput measures a less-impressive 660 MB/s when reading and 450 MB/s when writing, according to the datasheet. Sequential work figures for the 256 GB version are much closer to its bigger brother's, at 1370 MB/s when reading and 820 MB/s when writing.

Peak throughput is only part of the story, though. The 4K random read and write IOPS scale in a similar fashion. The smallest drive scores 35K read and 95K write IOPS. The 256 GB model comes in at 70K read and 130K write IOPS, while the 512 GB range-topper scores 130K IOPS for reads and 140K IOPS for writing. Rated durability scales with capacity, too. The 128 GB drive promises to withstand 80 TB of writes, the 256 GB model should cope with 160 TB, and the 512 GB unit ought to stand up to 320 TB.